My writings about business, leadership, anything else

Category: fun

Yesterday was National Pizza Day. I was partially in mourning because one of my favorite pizza spots closed a little while back. That was Duo Forni in Summerlin. We would go and just sit at the bar, have a glass of wine from a great little by the glass list, and share a salad and a pizza.

Now that Duo Forni is not around, it made me think about where I like to go for pizza. So here’s a short list, not necessarily in order of preference.

Grimaldi’s – a great standby, and where we decided to go for National Pizza Day. Friendly staff, indoor/outdoor seating, excellent meatballs (and they slice them like pepperoni), good crust, good wine list by the glass.

Pizza Rock – downtown Las Vegas. Tony Gemignani is a true connoisseur of pizza. He stocks his restaurant with multiple pizza ovens to cook at different temperatures and different styles. I prefer the “basic” New York style pizza. Plus the atmosphere is great.

Dom Demarco’s – in Summerlin, I like the variety here. We have ordered from here to cater a dinner party before. Their variety of salads are top notch, and their pastas are also good. Of course, the pizza is still the featured dish and it’s very good. A nice room as well.

California Pizza Kitchen – in Summerlin or The Park on the Strip. I know it’s not traditional pizza, but I love the modern CPK with the new menu, buffalo cauliflower is such a cool dish. And in Summerlin we like to sit at the bar and watch sports, enjoying a beer or glass of wine from a good list, and a soup and salad combo.

Metro Pizza – old school, if you are born and raised like me, you better say Metro Pizza!

I haven’t had the pleasure of eating Naked City Pizza, I hear great things. I’m sure I’m missing some. And of course, I didn’t address great pizza places in other cities. I personally am not a huge fan of Chicago style pizza, but when I’m there I certainly enjoy it, places like Lou Malnati’s.

Hopefully you got to enjoy National Pizza Day, at one of your favorite pizza places.

Before I joined the entertainment team at MGM Resorts, I spent several years leading our financed shared services. I have been thinking of that time lately, and realizing the most impactful thing about my time there was the people. That’s probably true about any season of our lives, actually; but it’s been really special to reflect on it in the past weeks and realize how true it is for myself relative to those years. Actually sitting down to write this post was inspired by one of my former teammates, who now works for me in entertainment; he was reminiscing about some of the things we used to do as a team.

When I joined the team in 2009, we only had three departments acting as some form of corporate or shared services, and two of them had formerly reported elsewhere in the organization and one was very newly formed after a few years of project work to transform the function and re-organize the teams. About 150 people total.

When I left the team formally in 2015-ish (it was sort of a phased transition), there were six functional departments and a host of supporting areas and individuals. About 400 folks. We still had lots of things to work on, but we had proven that the model works, and become a leader in our industry in shared services. The team that made that happen is a bunch of all-stars, many of them still there. It was a privilege to lead them and work with them.

I learned a ton with them: I had never really managed a large team, I had never led an “operation” before, and I had never worked on such large complex projects. I screwed up a lot with them and with my colleagues, but I tried to make sure I learned from my mistakes, and help the team learn from our collective mistakes, and help them be continuous learners, and help them grow as leaders. We built practices and processes that I still use today – strategic planning, leadership development, team building. These were critical areas of focus for a growing organization having to manage through some difficult change. Here’s a few things they taught me while I was there:

People will pretty much do anything to have fun. The workplace generally is devoid of fun for a lot of folks. It can be particularly challenging with an area like accounting and finance – not nearly as “sexy” as y current job. Soon after I started, we started an internship program. It’s been a big source of talent – we had no interns when we started, by the time I left we had about seven interns each semester (UNLV) and 3-5 summer interns (other schools). One of the summer projects for the interns was to plan a fundraiser, and the first group started a trend that was built upon. They threw basically a carnival party. Dunk tanks, face painting, music, food, eating contest. It was a blast. And everyone put their muscle behind it, helping plan the event, leveraging resources to get décor, the list goes on. I used to joke that if we put that much energy into closing the books faster, we’d be done in a day. But the lesson was to give people some fun; our employees got more motivated, our turnover went down as we went along, as we incorporated fun into our routine (like cube decorating contests, wine and canvas events, participating in corporate sports competitions, and the list goes on). I am lucky now that entertainment has some built in fun, but I have slipped in ensuring organized fun to help the team build relationships within the team itself. I’m going to work on that.

People will do pretty much anything for charity. I have told countless leaders who are working in new or growing teams the power of philanthropy to build teams. If you are cynical, it’s a bait-type situation, hook people in for the good feelings of helping others, and “voila” the team builds stronger bonds. But I’m not cynical, so I call it a win-win. The point of both the first item and this item revolves around finding common goals. It proves how challenging it is for leaders to articulate a vision that is both clear and inspiring: the team should rally together to help us grow revenues, or implement a new system, or whatever. But what often motivates them is some other common goal – in the first case, trying to beat the pants off the other corporate groups in softball; in this case, volunteering together to feed the hungry or read to kids. While they are at it, they learn about each other, realize that each of them has a “soft” side, and suddenly work seems to go smoother, there is less office drama, and we all are more satisfied with our jobs.

We have to help each other. I learned so much from my leadership team in shared services. We gave each other regular feedback, based on the trust we built. We stepped in to help each other out in times of crisis. We all pitched in to work on projects, or train our staff, or help an employee struggling with something at home. I never realized how little one person can do, how it really takes a village. I learned how to build the village, and grow the village. And the things we accomplished were only a result of how well we did those things. I still get a lot of help from some of these folks even today. Today I say “leadership is a contact sport, but it is also a team sport.”

So to everyone who worked in our finance shared services center, who used to stop by my cube and say hi, or pay the extra money to dunk me at the intern event, or spend the extra hours trying to make our operation better – thank you. And to the leaders who worked and still work – and continue to lead fearlessly and expertly – thank you! I can never repay you for the life lessons and fond memories I have reflected on since then (and many more while writing this post!).

And to the person that inspired this post, look forward to some chicken nuggets, or costume bowling, or something similar soon. And thanks for forcing me to reflect and appreciate an important and irreplaceable part of my life.

Last time I posted this photo courtesy of @classiclasvegas. The photo is an aerial shot of the Strip, largely the west side of the Strip, from just north of The Mirage. Of course, the Mirage had just opened a couple of years earlier.

My challenge to you was to find/list/share interesting things from the photo. Here are some things I found:

The old Dunes golf course where Bellagio, CityCenter, Monte Carlo and T-Mobile Arena are now.

In the very bottom of the photo, there is just a parking lot for The Mirage, where TI (Treasure Island) stands now. I remember parking in that vast lot (which extended past the photo all the way to Spring Mountain Road).

There are not one but two temporary outdoor arenas in this photo. The classic Caesars Palace arena where they did major boxing matches and tennis matches. But when The Mirage opened, Steve Wynn had the goal to take a big chunk of that business. The one at Caesars kept getting encroached on by new hotel towers (see next bullet) and larger pools and parking garages. The one at The Mirage got overrun by a bigger convention center.

Caesars Palace has evolved so much – even at this point it was much bigger than when it opened; but look at all that has happened since this photo:

No more Omnimax (do you remember the Omnimax???), now it’s the Colosseum;

I don’t see the Forum Shops in this photo.

The Augustus and Octavius towers were both built after this photo.

The MGM Grand is not yet a reality. You can see the Marina Hotel in the top left of the photo, which was retained as part of the MGM Grand (the West Wing), and behind that is the old Tropicana golf course. How ironic that after 26 years of development, and a theme park (oh my gosh, we had a real-life theme park in Las Vegas!!), we are back to using that land for golf, in a slightly different form as TopGolf.

Look at the median of Las Vegas Boulevard – there were a lot less lanes and much more “stuff” in the median.

On the far left you can see the Aladdin Theater for the Performing Arts, now the AXIS at Planet Hollywood.

Farther south, no Luxor or Mandalay Bay yet.

Something is getting built near Harrah’s and the Imperial Palace (now Linq), I’m not sure what it is.

I’m sure I’m missing a bunch, but what a great way to realize how much Las Vegas has grown and adapted over time.

I recently saw this photo on twitter, thanks to the amazing twitter account of @classiclasvegas. If you haven’t seen it, you should follow it on twitter. Especially if you’ve been in Las Vegas for any length of time. Always showing old photos of Strip resorts, does trivia, just a really great twitter account.

The photo is an aerial shot of the Strip, largely the west side of the Strip, from just north of The Mirage. Of course, the Mirage had just opened a couple of years earlier.

My challenge to you – find/list/share the things you find of interest in this photo. There are many obvious ones and some not so obvious. I’ll get you started with some easy ones:

There is a golf course where Bellagio, CityCenter, Monte Carlo and T-Mobile Arena are now. That’s the old Dunes golf course.

In the very bottom of the photo, there is just a parking lot for The Mirage, where TI (Treasure Island) stands now. I remember parking in that vast lot (which extended past the photo all the way to Spring Mountain Road).